by Terry Mixon
Falcone, it seemed, was having some of the same concerns he was over what would happen after the war.
“First, we have to win the war,” he told her. “And that means taking down Immortal and the OWA’s First Fleet. You’ll remain aboard Incredible?”
“If you think you’re making this damn stunt without me, you’re wrong.”
“You, Saburo, and the exactly four Marines from Incredible who are qualified to use US Army T-51B Power Armor,” he confirmed. “We have an extra suit, but neither Saburo or I are qualified to use it and we don’t have time to learn. You?”
Falcone laughed.
“No. Not in the slightest.”
“Four walking tanks, a spy, and two blademasters,” Brad concluded aloud. “Doesn’t seem like much to hang the entire future of humanity on.”
“I know the blademasters,” Falcone told him. “I couldn’t risk everything in better company.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
It would have been a surprise to someone who didn’t know what to expect, Brad supposed. First Fleet was over a hundred warships, and they all lit off their engines at almost exactly the same time.
The positions of the cruisers, carriers, destroyers, and escorts around Jupiter meant that they were lighting off their engines at different accelerations and different vectors, at least initially, but the mass activation was simultaneous.
From Incredible’s flag deck, he had access to the course projections that showed every one of those ships meeting about a light-second out from Jupiter and converging into a single massive formation.
There were tricks they could pull with the formation once battle was joined, but for now, they would assemble a straightforward escort formation. Cruisers and carriers at the center, surrounded by a concentric sphere of destroyers and escorts.
“Think we’re surprising anybody?” Captain Nah asked.
“Lots of people,” he agreed. “But I doubt we’re surprising the OWA. They’ve been one step ahead of us the whole way.”
Which was why even his flag deck crew didn’t know the real plan. The only people aboard Incredible who knew about the stealth boarding ship were the people working on it.
“I’m counting all the ways this can go wrong,” Nah said after a moment. “But still…I can’t pretend it doesn’t feel good to be moving out. Taking the fight to them.”
Brad nodded.
“They’ve had the initiative so far,” he agreed. “Their war. Their offensives. Even our assault on the Trojan was a counteroffensive. Now…now we write the rules of this particular fight.”
The funniest part was that the worst thing the Phoenix could do, from Brad’s perspective, was withdraw. If the OWN forced First Fleet to chase them around the Solar System, First Fleet would run out of fuel first. The OWN would almost certainly destroy Saturn’s fueling facilities when they withdrew, leaving them with full tanks and Brad’s fleet running on fumes in short order.
Their entire plan hinged on Jack Mantruso either coming out to meet them or standing in defense of Saturn.
“He’s going to come to meet us,” Saburo said behind him. “We’ve met him.”
“He’s run from one fight with me already,” Brad pointed out. They’d both drawn blood that time—that was how the Agency had realized they were brothers—but the Phoenix had chosen to withdraw that time.
“This time, he thinks he has the advantage. He’s got the tonnage, the guns, the ships. In his mind, he has to think he can’t lose.”
“Then he’ll be wondering how I’m planning to stab him in the back,” Brad said. “He’d have a clever plan—and he knows I’m not one for suicidal attacks.”
“So, he’ll keep guessing. Right up until it’s too damn late.”
Brad shook his head.
“Maybe,” he allowed. “You’re ready for the briefing?”
“Everyone will meet in the bay in twenty minutes,” Saburo told him firmly. “Part of me wishes I’d stayed in the Trojans, you know. Goes against the grain to leave a job unfinished.”
“And miss this?” Brad gestured to the screen showing the slowly assembling formation of First Fleet. “The greatest space battle in human history. Would you be anywhere else?”
“I’m a ground-pounder, boss. I have a place in this battle, but still…not sure ‘the greatest space battle in history’ is the place for a grunt like me.”
Brad snorted.
“I’ll meet you downstairs,” he told his old friend. “A few last details to sort out here.”
The shuttle bay they’d taken over had seen its usual occupants transferred to other ships or the stations around Io. In their place was a single spacecraft, slightly smaller than a mercenary or fleet combat shuttle.
Its entire hull was a light-drinking black, so dark it shed the eye almost as effectively as it absorbed radar and other scanners. In its current state, large panels were open and the racks of heat sinks were visible.
Unlike the stealth on, say, Incredible, the heat sinks on this craft weren’t designed to be cooled via radiators. They could absorb more heat per kilogram than the cruiser’s heat sinks, but at the price of being irretrievable once heated up. The sinks could be ejected if there was an appropriate moment, but Brad expected them to have to hang on to the heat sinks as they closed with the OWA fleet.
The heat sinks weren’t the only thing designed to be ejected. The spacecraft’s built-in engine was a low-heat-signature ion engine, but that lacked the force to get the shuttle moving at a speed that would allow them to move away from the fleet. A pair of high-intensity fusion engines were mounted under the spacecraft. They were the same carefully designed, heat-vectored engines used by the Fleet for the cruisers. With a little careful setup, any extra heat from the stealth ship would be lost in the background of the Sun and First Fleet.
“The bomb is mounted,” Saburo told him quietly as the door closed behind him. “I read the specifications, and having that thing on the same cruiser as me makes me nervous. Riding it the whole way over to Immortal? My blood pressure is going to be a mess.”
Brad snorted.
“Everybody will fit in around it?” he asked. Past the spacecraft he could see the immense coffins of the storage and charging stations for the T-51B armor his Marines would use to back them up.
“Between the bomb and the armor storage, it’s going to be a damn cramped fit,” Saburo told him. “I wish I’d had the time to qualify on one of those things though. It took the Marines a while to find guns that the suits could carry that weren’t going to punch holes through spaceship hull.”
“They’re not designed for space combat,” Brad admitted. “Any concerns from that?”
“The armor suits have hazardous environment suites that we’ve modified to function as vacuum suits,” Saburo said. “That’s probably the biggest concern: they’ve got the power for an hour or so of combat operation, but we’re only going to have canned air for thirty minutes.
“We’re going to need them to either breathe Immortal’s air until they need to go on canned, or accept that we only really have thirty minutes of operating time. Either way, we can pretty much assume Immortal is going to end up a vacuum around us as soon as they know we’re aboard.”
“Thirty minutes?” Brad grimaced. “That’s not a lot of time to take control of a battleship. Or even just to get to the admiral’s office.”
“The good news is that we have full plans of the ship. We can land close to the target, but…” Saburo shook his head. “That hour is it, boss. The suits have a storage compartment that we’ve stuck small arms and air masks in, but once they ditch the suits, our firepower and survivability go way down.”
“So, after an hour, the Lord Protector better be dead.”
“Or we will be.”
The morbid tone of the conversation was interrupted as Falcone led the four Marines coming with them around the spacecraft.
“Everybody grab a box,” she ordered. “We’re a minimum of six days from inte
rcept, but most of us have work to do between now and then, so this is the closest we’re going to have to a detailed briefing before we stuff ourselves in the flying black box.”
“Who’s flying this thing, anyway?” one of the Marines asked.
“I am,” Falcone replied. “There isn’t a pilot in the Fleet qualified on an Agency stealth insertion ship.”
She tossed Brad a black bracer, clearly designed to go over his upper left arm.
“Don’t turn that on until we’re in space,” she told him. “It’ll be scanning a bunch of vital signs, but as soon as you go down, the bomb goes off.”
“So, objective one is keep the Admiral alive, got it,” another Marine replied. “I saw that bomb. I don’t want it going off anywhere near me.”
“Objective one is disable Immortal,” Brad said quietly. “Everything else is a subset of that. If we can get me to Jack Mantruso’s office, I can shut her down. If we can’t…we set off the bomb and hope that will cripple her badly enough that the Fleet can finish the job.”
All four Marines looked at him in silence.
“This is not intended to be a suicide mission,” he told them, “but you need to understand the priorities and the risks. We are all expendable going in. So long as Immortal is stopped, we win.”
“And the best way to stop Immortal is to get the Admiral to the override,” Falcone cut in. “So long as the Admiral is alive, we have a chance to take her entirely out of the fight.
“If the Admiral dies, the nuke is our only option…and there’s no way we’re getting off Immortal once she’s alerted. So, the nuke is wired to the Admiral’s life signs.”
She studied the Marines.
“You four are the most experienced Marines in First Fleet as far as power armor goes,” Falcone told them. “This is a volunteer gig and you all volunteered, but if you want to back o—”
“No, sir!” all four chorused in unison.
“We’re in it to win it, sirs,” the first Marine told them. “You get us aboard and then we cover the Admiral through to the override. What happens then?”
“Then we hold whatever space we’ve taken for the override,” Falcone replied. “There are at least thirty elite Praetorians aboard Immortal, but they’re supposed to be the only armed soldiers aboard. If we can hold against them and keep the battleship disabled, it’s over.”
“It’s all over,” Brad reminded them. “This is a Hail Mary checkmate, people. Bailey is clever and we’ve got a lot of smart people building tactics to help turn the battle to come, but if Immortal is in the enemy line when the shooting starts, we lose.
“If Immortal isn’t in the enemy line, we win. It’s that simple.”
One of the Marines turned to study the coffin-like storage locker behind them.
“Well, then, I think the four of us”—she gestured at the Marines—“need to start doing some virtual drills. The suits will support that and we have Immortal’s floor plan, right?”
“The only advantage of her defection is that we know everything about her, except whatever Mantruso’s done since he took her,” Falcone agreed.
“Then we’ll drill,” the Marine said firmly. “You do your parts, sir, and once we’re aboard Immortal, we’ll get you to that damned office.”
Or die trying went unspoken.
They were Marines…and everybody in the room knew the price of failure.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“Well, it seems he’s finally made up his mind.”
Brad nodded in response to Bailey’s comment as he studied the latest sensor reports from Saturn. The OWA had spent several days adjusting their positions around their new conquest, but now they were moving out.
Immortal led the way, with the cruisers settling in on her flanks and the destroyers and light escorts filling in the gaps. The carriers hung back behind the rest of the fleet, farther back than Brad was holding his carriers, in fact.
Of course, Brad was the underdog of this fight. First Fleet couldn’t afford to give up the mass drivers and torpedo launchers aboard those carriers.
It took the OWA ten minutes to shake up their formation, but then the sky lit up with energy as they brought their drives online.
“They’re coming fast,” he noted aloud. He’d chosen not to strain any of the systems of his fleet, and they were accelerating toward Saturn at thirty meters per seconds squared.
“Fifty MPS squared,” Bailey agreed. “The Lord Protector trusts his engineers more than I’d trust mine…and a lot more than I’d trust his.”
“His will probably get shot if they have a failure,” Brad said grimly. “You’re clear to adjust the fleet course for optimal intercept, Vice Admiral.”
He was running an entirely different intercept vector on his wrist-comp, a set of data he wouldn’t even let enter Incredible’s main systems. If the OWA had continued to hold at Saturn, they’d been three days from contact and less than two from needing to launch the stealth ship.
Now, they were maybe thirty hours from combat…and he needed to get the boarding operation underway within the next hour.
“Captain Nah, meet me in my office,” he ordered.
His flagship captain looked surprised but nodded her acknowledgement over the video link to the bridge.
His office was next to the flag deck but a decent distance from the main bridge. It took Nah two minutes to reach his office, by which time he had coffee poured and waiting for her.
“Bailey sent out the updated course?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Nah confirmed. “Assuming they’re vectoring for a minimum-velocity meeting engagement, we’ll do the same and enter range in thirty-one hours.”
Brad tapped a command and brought up the course as Nah grabbed her coffee. The assumption was that the OWA would try to extend the engagement time, as would First Fleet. They’d open fire with torpedoes and the big guns at about twenty thousand kilometers, but if they controlled the vectors, they’d be in range for hours. If both of them tried to extend the fight, they could easily end up at zero velocity relative to each other, even as the battle drifted toward Saturn.
The battle wasn’t going to last long enough to reach Saturn, regardless of whether Brad disabled Immortal.
“Then it’s time, Captain Nah,” he told her. “Bailey will be relaying through you until the battle is joined, then she’ll assume full command.” He shook his head. “The confusion is going to suck, but it’s necessary.
“I have faith in First Fleet’s ability to handle the changeover, but I don’t have faith that my absence won’t leak to the enemy,” he admitted. “I trust the flag-deck crew to know I’m missing, but that’s it.”
“We’ll keep it under wraps, sir,” Nah replied. She paused. “And if you fail?”
“Then Bailey commands First Fleet and her job is to end the war,” Brad told her. Bailey’s objectives if the boarding operation failed were brutally simple: cripple the OWA’s battle fleet.
At any cost.
The door slid open without any warning and Kate Falcone stepped in.
“You’ve run the numbers,” she said without preamble. “We have twenty minutes.”
“I know,” he agreed. “Nah, enjoy the coffee,” he told his flag captain. “See if you can make it look like we had a meeting. As few people as possible can know I’m gone.”
“That isn’t a small number, sir,” she warned him.
“Then try and keep it to people you trust completely. We’re already trusting everyone aboard with the future of the system, but this secret could change everything.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“I know you will.”
He traded a handshake with Nah and stepped out into the corridor. It was dead silent, an unusual emptiness aboard a warship.
“People really trust the software aboard a warship to tell them the truth,” Falcone told him. “Right now, the computer says the corridors we’re moving through are having minor coolant leaks. People will avoid them un
til repaired, and Engineering isn’t getting any notice of a required repair.
“It will give us enough time to get to the docking bay unseen.”
Saburo and the Marines were waiting when Brad and Falcone arrived, their trip through the cruiser disturbingly uninterrupted.
“Can you do that on any Fleet ship?” Brad asked her as the hangar door closed behind them.
“Sadly, no,” she told him. “Captain Nah set me up with special access privileges on Incredible so I could watch for active hostile agents.” She shrugged. “I didn’t find anyone, so this runaround might be redundant, but…”
“We learned never to underestimate the Cadre,” Brad finished. “And OWI doesn’t seem to have lost any of their edge.”
“Given some of the resources the Cadre had deployed over the years, I have to wonder how long the OWA has actually existed in some form,” Saburo said. The mercenary had already exchanged his usual casual uniform for a combat vac-suit. The helmet was off, but the suit was still designed to resist small-arms fire.
“Everyone’s big question about the first Blackhawk attack was ‘Where did the Terror get the troops?’ Well, now we know,” Brad agreed. “I’m guessing the Cadre already controlled a lot of the smaller settlements by then. Most of them are only a few thousand people, but if you control a hundred settlements, that’s easily half a million.”
“And conscripting ten thousand soldiers out of half a million people isn’t difficult,” Saburo agreed. “It can’t have helped their control of the outer system when none of them came home.”
Brad nodded, burying a flash of guilt as he grabbed his own vac-suit and started changing. Cadre commandos and OWA commandos were volunteers at best, indoctrinated at worst. There was no saving them.
The crews of the Independence Militia and the OWN and the ground troops of the OWA armies were conscripts, trapped by threats to their families and home stations. If he could, Brad had every intention of letting them surrender.